Caernarfon is a Royal town, community

Community (Wales)

A community is a division of land in Wales that forms the lowest-tier of local government in Wales. Welsh communities are analogous to civil parishes in England....

 and port in Gwynedd

Gwynedd

Gwynedd is a county in north-west Wales, named after the old Kingdom of Gwynedd. Although the second biggest in terms of geographical area, it is also one of the most sparsely populated...

, Wales

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

, with a population of 9,611. It lies along the A487 road

A487 road

The A487 is a trunk road in Wales, running up the western side of the country from Haverfordwest in the south to Bangor in the north.It starts at Merlin's Bridge near Haverfordwest, from where it travels north west to St David's, then switches back north east through Fishguard, Cardigan, Aberaeron,...

, on the east banks of the Menai Straits, opposite the Isle of Anglesey

Anglesey

Anglesey , also known by its Welsh name Ynys Môn , is an island and, as Isle of Anglesey, a county off the north west coast of Wales...

. The city of Bangor

Bangor, Gwynedd

Bangor is a city in Gwynedd, north west Wales, and one of the smallest cities in Britain. It is a university city with a population of 13,725 at the 2001 census, not including around 10,000 students at Bangor University. Including nearby Menai Bridge on Anglesey, which does not however form part of...

 is 8.6 miles (13.8 km) to the northeast, while Snowdonia

Snowdonia

Snowdonia is a region in north Wales and a national park of in area. It was the first to be designated of the three National Parks in Wales, in 1951.-Name and extent:...

 fringes Caernarfon to the east and southeast. Caernarvon and Carnarvon are archaic anglicised

Anglicisation

Anglicisation, or anglicization , is the process of converting verbal or written elements of any other language into a form that is more comprehensible to an English speaker, or, more generally, of altering something such that it becomes English in form or character.The term most often refers to...

 spellings of Caernarfon, but used rarely.

Abundant natural resources in and around the Menai Straits enabled human habitation in the Caernarfon area during pre-history

Prehistoric Britain

For the purposes of this article, Prehistoric Britain is that period of time between the first arrival of humans on the land mass now known as Great Britain and the start of recorded British history...

.